Department Explorer: Emergency Services

The Department Explorer: Emergency Services analytics accelerator provides multiple views of data pertaining to the operational efficiency, utilization, and financial performance of the emergency department (ED). By surfacing data in the context of specific ED process paths, the application enables deep analysis and meaningful insight that can be leveraged to save costs, improve utilization, and speed throughput.

The problem

• Waits, delays, and interruptions are so common in Emergency Departments that patients and clinicians regard them as a standard part of receiving and providing care. Yet these issues seriously hamper the ability to deliver a positive patient experience—and to provide timely and appropriate care.
• Obtaining actionable data necessary for demand/capacity management is challenging, particularly trying to forecast demand while managing capacity. Appropriate, reliable data to help inform a surge capacity plan remains elusive.

Our approach

The Emergency Services application provides multiple views of data important for the efficient day-to-day operation of a pediatric or adult ED of any size, volume band, academic affiliation, or geographic location. It presents ED data separate from that of other hospital functions, giving users visibility into patient arrival to provider time, ED provider to disposition time, and disposition to admit or departure time. This yields insight into improvement opportunities that may contribute to outcomes such as a decrease in ED length of stay, faster ED throughput, and decrease in the number of patients who leave without being seen (LWBS).

Benefits and features

• Access easy-to-consume, ED-specific data at the granularity you need. The application provides a summary view—with detail drill-down capabilities—of metrics that reflect operational efficiency. The result? You can quickly and easily identify areas to improve.
• Identify and understand trends and variation. Tracking and trending historical volume, resource utilization, and scheduling data provide actionable information for identification of best practice as it relates to scheduling and impact of ancillary services on department throughput and quality.

Use cases

• The ED Medical Director assembles a small team to find ways to speed department throughput. Using the information provided via the app, they identify an area of significant variation—in this case, patient arrival to room time—and explore data from the most efficient ED shifts. Based on comparison with best-performing shifts, they set appropriate time targets, standardize triage, and roll out education on the new process. The team continues to use the application to monitor performance against the new time targets, gauge impact on important outcomes like the volume of patients who leave without being seen (LWBS) and overall ED length of stay (LOS), and scan for additional opportunities to improve efficiency.